I love easy questions but, in family law, I get so few of them that when I do see a truly easy question with a truly easy answer, I almost can’t believe my luck.
The short answer is no, you do not have to be flexible with your child’s father when he asks for changes to the schedule. The official schedule is whatever you agreed to in writing in your custody agreement or whatever specific visitation schedule was ordered by the judge in your case in the most recent court order.
You do not owe him flexibility and the court will not frown on you for choosing NOT to be flexible. After all, that is exactly what parenting plans and court orders are for: to establish a basic guideline for child custody and visitation that allows both parents to know what to expect. A simple, “No, but thank you – I’d prefer to follow the visitation schedule,” is a fine response, even to an overly emotional or manipulative tirade.
A related question: SHOULD you be flexible with your child’s father when he asks for changes?
I think there is an easy answer here, too, and it’s the same. No, you should probably not be flexible with your child’s father.
If yours were a truly cooperative coparenting dynamic, you would not even have Googled the answer to this question. You would both have been being flexible from the beginning, and it would be a shared responsibility that cuts both ways. You would know that it’s okay to be flexible – or even that, if the shoe were on the other foot, he’d be flexible with you – and it would never come to a moment of wondering whether you were doing the right thing. You’d already know and be doing it. That’s what collaborative coparents do.
But it takes two parents to be collaborative coparents; one cooperative coparent can’t create a coparenting dynamic all on her own, no matter how badly she (yes, I said she) wants what is best for her kids.
It is not better for your kids to be flexible with him when he is rigid with you; in fact, depending on the circumstances, he may even try to weaponize your flexibility against you. “Your Honor,” he will say. “She doesn’t even exercise the parenting time she already has!” If it’s not a two way street – or if he makes you jump through excessive hoops and beg for any kind of consideration to be extended in your direction – you already know that this is not flexibility.
This is control. His control. And you just fell right back into a power play dynamic because you wanted to do what you believed was best for the kids.
No, unfortunately, even if you WANT this to be the way your coparenting dynamic works, you can’t make it so by sheer force of will. A high conflict person will find ways to be high conflict – yes, even when you give him exactly what he asks for.
The way I see it, a parenting plan or custody order is like the foundation of a house. You can build on it as time goes on, but it should be a sturdy structural element that gives everyone the peace of mind of knowing that the home is well built. You should go into your post-divorce or post-breakup life knowing what to expect. Knowing when and where you’ll see the kids, how pick up and drop off will be handled, what child support will be, how child support and any reimbursements (like unreimbursed medical expenses) will be handled, and so on. There will be very few questions, especially if you stick to the formula as it exists. Follow the order. Refuse to deviate. It will become routine and that will feel much easier – and create less opportunities for him to try to weaponize ‘best interests of the children’ against you than if you demonstrate that you are open to flexibility.
Oftentimes, there aren’t easy answers but I do think that, when it comes to flexibility, if you have to ask, it’s not something you should extend to your child’s father. Stick to the parenting plan.
Yes, that may suck, especially if a big event – like a wedding or a family reunion – falls on time that you happen to not have the kids. But it would suck even more, and invite more volatility into your day-to-day life, to have constant requests to change the schedule. It would be less destabilizing for the kids to deal with disappointed hopes on just one occasion than to live in the constant tug-o-war that comes from parents going back and forth without ever really relying on the parenting plan.
So often, these attempts to modify on the fly are – from at least one parent’s side – designed to help facilitate coparenting and make things less difficult on the kids. But that doesn’t mean that is the practical implication of these kinds of changes.
For more information or to learn more about Virginia child custody, give our office a call at 757-425-5200 or visit our website at hoflaw.com.